Yesterday was the first day of Stugan and it has been amazing so far. The trip there was full of adventures and the atmosphere here is welcoming and family like. Let me tell you about my first day at Stugan!

I took a ferry from Gdansk to Nynnshamn, which took 18 hours and was kind of wobbly. Still ferries are spectacular marine beings, and if you ever have a chance, you should totally check them out!

I have arrived without major hiccups. Well, the wipers broke on the way and my car battery spilled inside the car, but I still made it in time :P Sweden ism a beautiful country, and unlike mainland europe, it has a lot of wilderness and you don’t really pass a lot of villages on your way.

Jana and Tommy Palm

(most of) The Team

Stugan is a game accelerator program taking place in a Swedish cabin in the middle of nowhere. It is a non-profit endevour run by swedish game develpment profesionals who are the nicest people ever and just want to make something good happen for indies.

There are 25 game developers forming 15 teams from 16 different countries from all over the world. Everybody is awesome, super talented and the games look amazing! The thing is ran by Jana and Tommy Palm, and evebn though it has only been one day, this place feels like home and everybody is like a one big family (it kind of feels as if Tommy and Jana adopted all of us for the time being :P)

Sweden is full of lupin!

This was takes at 10pm

Stugan takes place in Bjursas Sweden is overgrown with lupin at this time of year, and lavender patches of it grow wild every here and there. It is much cooler (in both ways) than what I’m used to in Poland, and you can even find patches of snow and ice here and there.

There’s also no night going on, and the sun is way higher than usual, which makes it hard to judge the time correctly and easy to work too mjuch or stay up too late. The photo
above on the left was takes at 10pm. Can you tell it was that late? Also, it doesn’t get much darker than that.

Swedish breakfast! Yum!

My cozy corner!

I have a cozy spot for my VR setup. It took me an entire day to put the PC back together and connect everything but my workspace is super convenient now. And I have a lot of space for VR (managed to set up a 3.3m x 2.3m) which is also super convenient!

My plan here is to finish up an early access version of the game, but also to find a work / life balance and to become a viking. That’s a lot of things for 7 weeks. I will do ym best to post an update every Monday and stream every Thursday. And now I’m gonna get back to work. I really want to get this done (and we have a group hike after lunch, weee!)

So, recently I got a Switch (I love it!), and been playing Zelda, but since there’s only 32GB of Flash memory inside, I decided to dig up an old SD card I’ve been using in my Dell Venue 8 Pro (a reaaaallly neat Windows 10 tablet) before I decided to sit on it (seriously., tablets that fit your back pocket are the worst).

But as I tried to check for data my PC wouldn’t recognise it (acted as if there’s no valid partitioning present). “I must have installed Linux on it”, I thought, and promptly inserted it into my Switch deciding to format it there, and as i did that, switch hung up with gray screen and became unresponsive to everything including the power button. I thought “Shit” and as I wanted to take out the card it was reaaaallly hot and burned my finger a little (these things are pretty small).

I thought, “wow! that was scary” and I noticed that the card back sticker has moved and there’s my fingerprint on it, and also a small mark left on the switch. So I took some pictures and tweeted about that!

But before I know it this escalated into a disaster of people blaming the Switch. I wrote that it was the SD card fault in a following tweet. But… nobody reads “following” tweets and now I just seen this in a youtube video and a news outlet picked up on that. And now I feel bad so the tweet goes DOWN and here’s the full story.

MicroSD cards are really small. And a 128GB one contain 1,099,511,627,776 bits of data. If each of this bits was a tiny 1mm x 1mm tile, this would take 1 square kilometer! But it all fits into this tiny card!

Slightest error might cause a piece of insulation inside the card to be missing, thus creating a short circuit that will dissipate heat. That can also happen after time, as SD cards heat up quite a bit under normal operation.

Stuff breaks. I wouldn’t even ask for a replacement as this spent a year in my drawer. Perhaps it was even me who damaged mechanically it be accident. Perhaps it was radiation, or another device. Perhaps it was a bad batch. Who knows! Well, I don’t! But this escalated beyond reason so I took the thing down. Farewell, fake news!

My sincere apologies for all the confusion this caused. I did not mean that.

tl;dr I used a broken SD card. These are pretty rare. There’s no need to panic. The tweet is fake news and I took it down.

PS. Here are all the fake news, some of who decided to write their own part of this story for dramatic effect (chekc out these headlines!):

EDIT: removed the Japanese website, as it seems it listed the thing right! Apologies for more confusion!

EDIT 2: People are saying some of the news coin Amazon review from a different card! That was actually me doing this in the first place. The thing is, it seems that Amazon lists a single SD card review across multiple models! Talk about misinformation! Here is how it looks

EDIT 3: Found my favourite. This youtube video with a guy saying, I quote: “Apparently, his Switch overheated to the point his SD card got turned to mush. Can’t make this shit up.“ Well, you just did.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be at Tokyo Game Show! Due to illness I had to skip PAX, but I’m all up and ready for TGS! I wont be showing Mosh Pit Simulator, tho, but if you want to chat about it or see how good it loks on a screen, find me in Eastern Europe New Stars Area, booth 3-N12/15 in Hall 3! I’ve been in Tokyo for some time now and it’s gorgeous! I’m super excited for the show and super looking forward to it! See ya there!

Mosh Pit Simulator will be playable at Gamescom 2016 in Polish Pavillon located at booth B-026 in Hall 4.1 in Business Area!

As Pixel Heaven 2016 was the first time Mosh Pit Simulator was shown publicly, it was pretty much just a tech demo. This time, you wil be able to play the first scenes from the actual game! Feelf ree to come and play it ad hoc, however, if you have a busy schedule and would like to make sure you will get to play, I will gladly reserve a spot for you! Just drop me an email at just.sos.it@gmail.com!

I have a crazy week ahead of me, and even if you won’t make it to check out the game at Gamescom, you can catch me at surrounding events! Here’s my crazy week in a nutshell:

16:00, Saturday – Seminar – Making retro games in the future, or can games be demoscene? – I always had hard time making non-interactive things, thius most of my homegrown scene productions are just games that share features reminiscent of demoscene, such as size or hardware limitations. I will elaborate on the creation of these, and how I actually got to learn all that old shit even though it was all going on before I was even born :P

10:00, Monday – Talk – Building a Local Indie Game Community – I’ll talk about how Polish indie community evolved throughout several past years from pretty much not exisitng to a really vibrant, inclusive and supportive community!

11:15, Tuesday – Panel – Who needs diversity? Everybody! – We will discuss making our industry and community even more open for everyone and how we can be more inclusive supportive and create and maintain a welcoming safe space within this wretched industry (jk, I love this industry <3)

I’ll be there mostly at night crunching on a game between busy Gamescom days (I’ll prolly just faint on my keyboard)! Catch me there! :)

I’ll be on all of these events! Feel free to nag me via email or Twitter if you’d like to meet up and chat about the game or just hang out! I’ll gladly share some juicy details :) I’ll also have the tiny VRPC I built on me and will be showcasing the game on it if you want to check it out!

Since new generation high end laptops for VR gaming and development are still on their way, yet too close to get justify getting the old ones, I have decided to go with building a portable Mini-ITX VRPC for portable development and showcasing. I have managed to do so, and the result is this minimum-spec VRPC.

The specs

Processor: Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz

Motherboard:Gigabyte GA-Z97N-WiFi

Graphics: Gigabyte Geforce GTX 970 (short)

Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB DDR3-1600

Storage: Cucial M500 120GB SSD

Cooling: Zalman CNPS8900 CPU Cooler

Case: Lian-LI PC-TU100 Mini-ITX case

Power supply: Corsair SF 900W 80+ SFX

The entire thing is just around $1000, here’s a PCPARTPICKER link if you want to build a thing like that! Here are the SteamVR performance test results for it.

I must say, that right now, I would probably get a R9 Nano, instead of the short GTX 970, or wait for short GTX 1060 or RX 480 and swap the ram for 16GB, as 8GB might be fine for playing but is quite on the low end for dev (my workstation eats up 20GB when I work).

To build the thing I used parts from my living room PC. I replaced the case, the PSU and upgraded the CPU from Penntium G3258 and GPU from 750Ti.

I really like the case. it’s made form really thin aluminium and is really light. Looks sturdy tho, and provides good heating dissipation.

The performance

The entire thing weighs under 4kg (8 pounds), and is 25x17x27cm (10x7x11″) including feet and handle which makes it lighter than eGPU solutions! (Alienware Graphics Amp is 8 pounds without a graphics card inside and you need a 4 pound GPU inside and a 4 pound laptop to run it). The performance is acceptable, here are the SteamVR performance test results!

The case can heat up quite a bit, but it’s still acceptable levels of heat. The highest I got the GPU to go was 80, and CPU didn’t exceed 60. The GPU fan is just a couple of centimeters from the bottom of the case andd there are no holes there. Also, the SSD bay is over there, I hope the heat weill not shorten the drive lifespan.

I have not tested it in flight luggage, but I will definitely install safety precautions inside (stuff it with newspapers or so) before doing so. i did, however tested it in a showcase environment and it did splendid work for hours.

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Remote access

But having to carry a screen around with it would be cumbersome! So I came up with a way to directly operate the computer with only a Vive hooked up to it using remote desktop connection from a laptop! I have a 12″ retina Macbook (the one with USB-C) and high resolution screen on that thing makes it a good candidate form a remote operation machine, but you could use anything! Here’s how I set it up!

First of all, you need Windows 10 Pro to host RDP connections, and a screen to get started. Open explorer window, go to This PC, right click on a blank space, and select Properties, click on Advanced System settings. Go to Remote tab and check the Allow remote connections to this computer box. Go to Computer Name tab and make sure that Full Computer name is set to something legible and Workgroup is the same as the in computer that will try to access it. You will have to reboot when you change anything here.

When you have done that, hit Windows key, type run, hit enter, type shell:startup in the window and hit enter again. Inside the window, create a file named hostwifi.bat. To change the extension, you will have to click File Menu -> Change folder and search options -> View and uncheck Hide extensions of known file types checkbox. Right click the file, edit, and type the following inside:

Double click the file to run it. Press any to skip the countdowns as they are only needed at startup. Now open up the device you’d like to access you computer with. Remote Desktop Connections can run on anything form a desktop PC to smartphone. There’s an old Windows 7 app available on both 7 and 10, and the new shiny RDP app with red icon that’s available on Windows 10, Mac and smartphones. Both are good and performance is pretty much the same.

Connect to VRwifi wifi network, open Remote Desktop application, and type in the computer name you chosen in the box and hit Connect. Oh, and you need to set the audio playback to Play on remote machine in the options! This will improve performance, and you don’t really need sound to play on your remote access PC. You can toy with other options depending on your network performance to get the best results too. Changing the color depth helps a lot. If you have trouble authenticating, it’s easiest to use your Microsoft account credentials to log in to the remote PC. Anyways, that’s it! You are connected remotely to the PC! Unplug the screen, plug in Vive, run SteamVR, launch Unity and get hacking! :)

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The latency in display is pretty much not important, since the Vive is hooked up to the VRPC anyways. As for the performance, clunky Windows Wifi drivers on the Macbook have given me some troubles, but on OSX everything works magic wirelessly. If you need more sturdy solution, tho, you can connect via an ethernet cable and skip the Wifi setup completely. Also, when you set up the hosted wifi network on Windows 10 PC, make sure you disconnect from any other Wifi networks, as it will try to maintain incoming and outgoing connections at the same time hindering the performance. I haven’t used it so far for actual dev outside of testing, but I will do so next week and report back! Make sure you check out the forums as I will be posting smaller updates there!

I’ve been a bit quiet outside of twitter but I’ve been working tirelessly on the game! I’ll be making some cool announcements right here soon and I’m really excited so stay tuned! Other than that, game development is being game development, crashes, bugs, setbacks and nothing is ready on time, but I’m having hell lotta fun so I can’t really complain. Also, it’s 04:38 as I’m writing this, and my no-crunch principle has fallen. :P But despite too much work, I’m trying to stay up and healthy, with a lot of workout/exercise breaks, plus a bit of physiotherapy, since I injured my foot (but I’m gonna be back to 100% soon) in an actual mosh pit doing research for the game (and having fun, and getting beaten up). But I have some really cool footage, check it out!

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Ok, but back to the game! I have created and been maintaining a design document which is pretty just a doc file where I throw all of my ideas in trying to categorise them coherently, and here are some things that are gonna happen in the game:

Plot! There’s gonna be plot and cutscenes. This means story mode that you can beat start to finish! I’m crunching on the first scenes and I want them to be as bollocks as you can get! It take a lot of work but I’m super happy with where this is going!

Extra game modes I wan tto keep the game as “open” as it can get, in terms of letting the player break everything and play around and exploit bugs etc. And to facilitate that, apart from the story mod that ends, I’ll try to have funny game modes. If you have suggestions for these, bring it on!

More enemies! I made a chubby dude and a short lady, but I still llike the default dude the most. Oh, I also added a horse. And a giant velociraptor, but it doesn’t move yet!

Machinery and vehicles! In the first level, you’re riding a transport cart. You’ll be driving cars and flying helicopters too. And the mosh pit dudes will be there to “help” you with that :P

Superpowers! These are gonna include:

Force charge – Clecnh your fists and stay as immobile as possible to charge up! You ned full charge before performing force moves!

Time manipulation – Use the touchpad to manipulate time when charged!

Force draw / push – Use left hand to move objects around and draw them close and right to push enemies away from the distance.

If you want to suggest features, ask questions, nag me about a playable version, or just say hi, this is the place to do it! I’ll try to post dev updates there too! In the meantime, off I go! Cheeeers and stay tuned! More cool news will come tomorrow!

I’m proud to announce, that my next game, Mosh Pit Simulator is coming to VR in 2016! I made a little announcement trailer too, check it out!

The game will be playable next weekend (June 3-5, 2016) at Pixel Haaven in Warsaw, thus if you would like to check it out, make sure to drop by! If you would like to test the game or have additional questions, drop me an email! I will prepare a test build after Pixel Heaven!

For now I need to prepare a showcasing version, and upon showing I will pinpoint bugs to iron out, after that, I’ll send out a build for testing, so if you have a Vive and would like to try the game, drop me an email!

I’ll do updates on game development and whatnot starting next week too! See ya then!

Youtube went bollocks on copyrights and there are piles of cash you wouldn’t even imagine at play. A very lucrative way to ruin the service’s reputation it is for sure.

Thus, if anyone has trouble convincing the monetisation vault gate keepers that videos of my game are OK to monetise, just wave this document.

Let’s plays are one of just a few ways of small studio indiependent games to shine, therefore it is our duty to step up. Keep up the amazing work and don’t give in to Youtube’s ridiculous claims. Youtube sucks.